Thursday, October 1, 2009

4th of July on North Shore

It's a tradition to spend 4th of July weekend in Chicago. Usually we go to the Taste and watch fireworks near the water. This year we switched it up a little bit. We went to North Shore beach. Now I'm not usually a fan of the beach. It has way too much of the one thing I hate most.......SAND! There's no good way to go to the beach! You lay down a blanket and you walk all around the edges and not actually on it and then some dumb kid comes by and kicks up sand onto your neatly sand free blanket! You go home home with sand in all your bags and crevices that you sometimes may not find out about till hours or days later! Yuck! But worst of all, you can't even wash off. Lake water is less than appealing or the ocean makes my just cleanly shaven legs burn like the dickens, so there you have my aversion to the beach.......BUT for some reason this year it sounded like fun! So Denise and I got some last minute reservations on Priceline and stayed downtown at the Congress Hotel literally right across the street from the Taste. Remember this sentence, "RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET FROM THE TASTE"! It will come into play later on as you see pictures! :-)

So the plan was to go to the beach, out to dinner, down to the Taste and watch fireworks......this did not happen.

We waited for about a half hour till Lindsey and her friends got there. Denise wasn't sure if they would like the spot we picked out, so we sat with nothing spread out till they got there. Denise looked like she was doing a photo shoot with the blanket on top of the cooler!

Look at these hotties on the beach!

So remember when I said we were right across the street from the Taste? Well we left our hotel, hopped on the L and took that way over to Lincoln Park area to have dinner and watch fireworks from a friend's apartment that swore we could see them from his roof. First bummer, we weren't eating at Half Shell which is what we had been craving all day. I couldn't wait to dig into some crab legs and drawn butter. Second bummer, bad directions. We walked 10 minutes out of our way to find out that the restaurant was the other direction from the L. Third bummer, you CAN NOT, I repeat CAN NOT see the fireworks from this guy's roof! I mean if you would take down the entire Chicago city skyline then yes, we would have had like front row seats! Did I say that our hotel was RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET FROM THE TASTE?! haha

So we ended up at this barbecue joint. I hate barbecue and so does Denise but they assured us they had other stuff. Yeah, they have other stuff. You just ask for it without barbecue sauce and then it's bone dry! haha

Needless to say our 4th of July in Chicago was a smidge of a let down, but being in Chicago is always still fun.

D and I were tad bit annoyed though to find out that they all went to Half Shell the next night without us. Guess that parking issue wasn't an issue 24 hours later! haha